I'm deeply deeply against offering self-hosted SaaS.
In summary because it takes you from a world where 1 instance of your application exists under your full control to a world where 1000 instances of your application exists all over the place outside of your control.
At that point you turn into a "classic" software vendor where you have to help people "operate" your software. After you have long moved on from something someone will still be on the version from 3 years ago and talking to you about "upgrade/migration path".
I firmly prefer a world where there is only "one operator" for the product and I fully manage 1 instance of the product as a total black box and the end users use it as a ... hello? ... "as a service".
My advice is unless someone cares enough to write you a life-changing check ... stay away from it.
Depends on which model will be more beneficial to your customers and also be profitable to you at the same time. You can learn from companies like PostHog that stopped offering paid self hosted managed solution. Either you use their Open Core version yourself OR you pay for their cloud hosting. This article will hopefully help:
Answering from a customer point of view- sensitive, regulated or simply old fashioned industries will want to avoid using SaaS for sensitive material like credentials.
I think that the main challenge I faced, again as a customer, is support and maintenance- your software will run on an endless variety of platforms using different versions of it by people with varying competence levels and you'll need to support all of them
I'm deeply deeply against offering self-hosted SaaS. In summary because it takes you from a world where 1 instance of your application exists under your full control to a world where 1000 instances of your application exists all over the place outside of your control.
At that point you turn into a "classic" software vendor where you have to help people "operate" your software. After you have long moved on from something someone will still be on the version from 3 years ago and talking to you about "upgrade/migration path".
I firmly prefer a world where there is only "one operator" for the product and I fully manage 1 instance of the product as a total black box and the end users use it as a ... hello? ... "as a service".
My advice is unless someone cares enough to write you a life-changing check ... stay away from it.
Depends on which model will be more beneficial to your customers and also be profitable to you at the same time. You can learn from companies like PostHog that stopped offering paid self hosted managed solution. Either you use their Open Core version yourself OR you pay for their cloud hosting. This article will hopefully help:
https://posthog.com/blog/sunsetting-helm-support-posthog
Answering from a customer point of view- sensitive, regulated or simply old fashioned industries will want to avoid using SaaS for sensitive material like credentials. I think that the main challenge I faced, again as a customer, is support and maintenance- your software will run on an endless variety of platforms using different versions of it by people with varying competence levels and you'll need to support all of them
Not really. Just ship a Docker image and anything else can fall outside of standard support.